British Prime Minister Boris Johnson moved more slowly than the leaders of many other prosperous countries to adopt a lockdown in view of the coronavirus threat.

But a Reuters investigation has found that for more than two months, the scientists whose advice guided Downing Street did not clearly signal their worsening fears to the public or the government about a disastrous Covid-19 outbreak.

Interviews and records suggest that the scientific committees that advised Johnson didn’t study, until mid-March, the option of the kind of stringent lockdown adopted early on in China. The scientists’ reasoning: Britons, many of them assumed, simply wouldn’t accept such restrictions.

Read the full report here.